Month: January 2010

This is the first in a series of articles to be republished on The Bitter Pill by Ashleigh Stewart, a scholar investigating the drugging of children and natural alternatives. This initial series is based on research conducted for her dissertation. You will be hearing much more from Ashleigh. Her bio and a link to her website are coming soon.

WEIRD SCIENCE!?:

Investigating Attention Deficit Disorder

By ASHLEIGH STEWART

“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.” (Kahlil Gibran, 1923)

As scientific as the name may sound ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ and ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’ (AD/HD) are alleged and somewhat mysterious ‘diseases’ of which, despite numerous studies dedicated to investigating their cause, no convincing evidence of any brain malfunction or other biological or genetic abnormality has been discovered.

Despite the fact that the source of this ‘so-called’ disease is still vague, the symptoms that define AD/HD are prevalent and prominent, so much so that approximately 6 million children in America alone have been diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder and prescribed with psycho-stimulant drugs, such as ‘Methylphenidate’, otherwise known by it’s brand name ‘Ritalin’, as the primary method of treatment.

My question is what is AD/HD? Why are so many children being diagnosed with it these days, and what could be the real cause of it? Also, how much do we really know about the effects of stimulant drugs on our children? How will taking these drugs affect children’s lives physiologically, psychologically, emotionally and socially as they grow up? Also, what are the implications in terms of the future of the human race and our world if we keep drugging millions of our children with dangerous and highly addictive drugs?

Never in the history of our planet have so many children been put on psycho-stimulant drugs to alter their behaviour, emotions and sense of perception, to treat a disease that remains to be proven to exist.

As a mum of two children under the age of three, a student of Yoga and Metaphysical Science I feel it is my duty to investigate this alleged disease and examine what lies at the source of society’s ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ and why so many children are being drugged. As a result, it has become my goal to help children reconnect with their true inner essence, to simply be who they were born to be before their human rights, freedom and innocence was stolen away and replaced with a diagnosis that labels them as being damaged and disordered, just because they do not act in ways certain adult ‘authoritarians’ believe to be appropriate.

It is my belief that in the very moment we label children as being disordered we influence they way they will see themselves, and define their future in less than positive ways as a result. Also, the moment we choose to drug our children is the moment we rob them of their essence, steal their spirit and dis-empower ourselves as parents by giving the responsibility of our children’s well-being over to the medications we give them.

Just why are so many parents willing to succumb to this type of drug-influenced upbringing for their children? I am certain that this was not part of their dream of parenthood while planning to have children!

Does this happen because children these days are misunderstood? Is it because they are evolving and no longer fit into the convenience of the ‘one size fits all’ society that we have become, a society which, on the other hand claims to celebrate diversity, liberty and freedom of expression?

Drugging our children is apparently a more convenient method of handling the challenges that come hand in hand with raising children, while we as adults struggle through the daily grind, and the task of managing the hustle and bustle of life in this fast-pace and competitive world. This whole situation is nothing short of tragic in my eyes, and if we do not begin to address the issue of mass drugging of children now, I fear we are paving a dark and gloomy path into tomorrow’s world.

We do have a choice however; we can keep allowing these things to happen to our children, or we can take responsibility for their well being by taking action and educating ourselves about the reality of the AD/HD diagnosis and the stimulant drugs that are used to treat it. It is crucial that we stop labelling and drugging children now!

Like this:

“I have no interest in sugarcoating what happened in Massachusetts,” said Sen. Robert Menendez, the head of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee. “There is a lot of anxiety in the country right now. Americans are understandably impatient.”

Menendez says Americans have high anxiety and are impatient? Oh geez Louise… Speaking of sugarcoating… I recall using that word in reference to Menendez and the MOTHERS Act pushers a few more than 10 times.

In epic upset, GOP’s Brown wins Mass. Senate race

BOSTON – In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to win the U.S. Senate seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for nearly half a century, leaving President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in doubt and marring the end of his first year in office.

The loss by the once-favored Democrat Martha Coakley in the Democratic stronghold was a stunning embarrassment for the White House after Obama rushed to Boston on Sunday to try to save the foundering candidate. Her defeat on Tuesday signaled big political problems for the president’s party this fall when House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates are on the ballot nationwide.

“I have no interest in sugarcoating what happened in Massachusetts,” said Sen. Robert Menendez, the head of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee. “There is a lot of anxiety in the country right now. Americans are understandably impatient.”

Brown will become the 41st Republican in the 100-member Senate, which could allow the GOP to block the president’s health care legislation and the rest of his agenda. Democrats needed Coakley to win for a 60th vote to thwart Republican filibusters.

Brown led by 52 per cent to 47 percent with all but 3 percent of precincts counted.

One day shy of the first anniversary of Obama’s swearing-in, the election played out amid a backdrop of animosity and resentment from voters over persistently high unemployment, Wall Street bailouts, exploding federal budget deficits and partisan wrangling over health care.

For weeks considered a long shot, Brown seized on voter discontent to overtake Coakley in the campaign’s final stretch. His candidacy energized Republicans, including backers of the “tea party” protest movement, while attracting disappointed Democrats and independents uneasy with where they felt the nation was heading.

A cornerstone of Brown’s campaign was his promise to vote against the health care plan.

Though the president wasn’t on the ballot, he was on many voters’ minds.

“I voted for Obama because I wanted change. … I thought he’d bring it to us, but I just don’t like the direction that he’s heading,” said John Triolo, 38, a registered independent who voted in Fitchburg.

He said his frustrations, including what he considered the too-quick pace of health care legislation, led him to vote for Brown.

Coakley called Brown conceding the race, and Obama talked to both Brown and Coakley, congratulating them on the race.

The Democrat said the president told her: “We can’t win them all.”

Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin said he would notify the U.S. Senate on Wednesday that Brown had been elected. Originally, he had said he might take over two weeks to certify the results of the special election, giving Democrats a window in which to try to rush through final passage of Obama’s health care plan.

Brown will be the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in 30 years.

Even before the first results were announced, administration officials were privately accusing Coakley of a poorly run campaign and playing down the notion that Obama or a toxic political landscape had much to do with the outcome.

Coakley’s supporters, in turn, blamed that very environment, saying her lead dropped significantly after the Senate passed health care reform shortly before Christmas and after the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing that Obama himself said showed a failure of his administration.

Days before the polls closed, Democrats were fingerpointing and laying blame.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the House Democrats’ campaign effort, said Coakley’s loss won’t deter his colleagues from continuing to blame the previous administration.

“President George W. Bush and House Republicans drove our economy into a ditch and tried to run away from the accident,” he said. “President Obama and congressional Democrats have been focused repairing the damage to our economy.”

At Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel, giddy Republicans cheered, chanted “USA” and waved the “tea party” version of the American flag.

Even before Brown won, the grass-roots network fueled by antiestablishment frustrations, sought credit for the victory, much like the liberal MoveOn.org did in the 2006 midterm elections when Democrats rose to power.

GOP chairman Michael Steele said Brown’s “message of lower taxes, smaller government and fiscal responsibility clearly resonated with independent-minded voters in Massachusetts who were looking for a solution to decades of failed Democrat leadership.”

Wall Street watched the election closely. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 116 points, and analysts attributed the increase to hopes the election would make it harder for Obama to make his changes to health care. That eased investor concerns that profits at companies such as insurers and drug makers would suffer.

Across Massachusetts, voters who had been bombarded with phone calls and dizzied with nonstop campaign commercials for Coakley and Brown gave a fitting turnout despite intermittent snow and rain statewide.

Galvin, who discounted sporadic reports of voter irregularities throughout the day, predicted turnout ranging from 1.6 million to 2.2 million, 40 percent to 55 percent of registered voters. The Dec. 8 primary had a scant turnout of about 20 percent.

Voters considered national issues including health care and the federal budget deficits.

Fears about spending drove Karla Bunch, 49, to vote for Brown. “It’s time for the country, for the taxpayers, to take back their money,” she said. And Elizabeth Reddin, 65, voted for Brown because she said she was turned off by the Democrat’s negative advertisements, saying: “The Coakley stuff was disgusting.”

Like this:

I just finished watching two hours of sunday morning talk shows. I stayed home from church this morning because of illness and enjoyed clicking around listening to all of the blather. Health Care is front and center in all of this debate and it was interesting to hear all of the various arguments and see all of the familiar faces and voices sharing views.

For me the summation of all of these views are rolled into the picture that my husband took of me in 1990. I share this with all of you so that the look on my face and the total blunting of my emotions that was captured in this picture can stand as a witness to the folly of chemical treatments for women.

As a teen I was grounded in medicine by the lifestyle lived by my family and my desire to become a nurse when I was an adult. I made steps towards that goal by studying to be a medical assistant in high school and working in a medical office as a teen. As I witnessed the medical profession up close and worked for a year with doctors, nurses, and observed the drug reps doing their thing, one thing became very clear to me during my year of being a part of the Medical Profession.

That being, I had zero desire to be a part of the Medical Profession as an adult. I am so grateful to have had that experience at such a tender age. It opened my eyes in ways that an outsider just can’t observe. And it fueled my desire to pursue my singing and acting unfettered by the emotional need to do something “practical” when I went away to BYU to study Musical Theatre.

I was always a “sickie” as a child and have struggled mightily with my health for most of my adult life. I suppose those of us who have interfaced most with the doctors and the drug companies who have trained them have the most significant testimony to offer as the health care debate rages.

If I thought for one second that what is being offered at taxpayer expense in the new health care bill would do one positive thing for families over the long haul, I might pause in my Free Market views and consider that perhaps an investment in our nations health would be a good thing.

Since the status quo of medicine as it is practiced today is what will be entrenched with this bill, I have to yell to anyone listening that Medical Slavery for the vast majority of our people is what will be practiced on the American Family for the next ten generations…if we make it that far. With death, disibility, infertility, damaged babes, trauma, and a “pill for all that ails us” funded by the taxpayers the fruit of this abortion of a bill, we have to pray that with the election of Scott Brown, and his 41st vote, it will go down to defeat as the last and final attempt by the Commies in our Country to rob the American People of their sovereignty and force a Medical Dictatorship and Pharmacuetical Facism on the Men, Women, and Children of the US.

Rather than handing the pharma companies a fifty year guarantee of profits, the attorney general of the US should be serving them with papers of indictment for the past hundred years of medical fraud perpetrated on the American People and force them to refund every person medically damaged by Vaccines, Antibiotics, Bogus and unnecessary surgery, court ordered psychiatric meds, forced chemo, and the thousands of children pulled from their parents homes and put into foster care simply because parents refused to accept current medical dogma should be returned to their homes, detoxed from the psychiatric drugs they have been forced to take, and compensated financially for all of the side effects that the toxicity of the drugs caused.

The Fox is in the hen house and the Farmer has just come out and asked him if he wants that chicken baked or fried. It is time to shoot the Fox and set the hens free.

Jenny Hatch 2001

Every positive step towards health that I have taken for myself and my family has come with taking personal responsibility, paying for my own books, supplements, alternative healing doctors, and by freeing myself from Medical Slavery.

As I have learned self sufficiency as related to my Mothering, the Medical Profession has stood as a very large barrier to me reaching Freedom. But this Goliath of a profession that was built on lies and is supported by the most devious and insipid media propaganda is simply a paper tiger that when finally torched with go up in smoke. As A health freedom writer I have all of the matches, gasoline, and molotov cocktails necessary to get the job done.

Please join me in the burning of the Medical Cartel in the coming weeks and months!

As a survivor and opponent of electroshock (ECT, electroconvulsive “treatment”) who, over the years, has communicated with hundreds of other survivors of the procedure and has studied the subject and written extensively about it, I am responding to the Food and Drug Administration’s call for information and comments regarding the current classification of the ECT devices. I urge the FDA not to reclassify these devices from Class III (high risk) to Class II (low risk) because the procedure continues to be, as it has been since its introduction in 1938, an extremely harmful method used on persons diagnosed as “mentally ill.”

Here, in summary form, is my case against ECT:

1. Electroshock is a brutal, dehumanizing, memory-destroying, intelligence-lowering, brain-damaging, brainwashing, and life-threatening technique. ECT robs people of their memories, their personality and their humanity. It reduces their capacity to lead full, meaningful lives; it crushes their spirits. Put simply, electroshock is a method for gutting the brain in order to control and punish people who fall or step out of line, and intimidate others who are on the verge of doing so.

2. Brain damage is the most ruinous effect of ECT and lies at the root of most of ECT’s other harmful effects. It is also the 800-pound gorilla in the living room whose existence electroshock psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge, at least publicly. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the American Psychiatric Association’s Practice of Electroconvulsive Therapy, which states that “in light of the accumulated body of data dealing with structural effects of ECT, ‘brain damage’ should not be included [in the ECT consent form] as a potential risk of treatment” (2001, p. 102). The exclusion of brain damage as a risk of ECT makes a sham of the entire ECT informed-consent process and turns what is ostensibly a medical procedure into an act of criminal assault. The following statements and reports, all by psychiatrists or neurologists, refute the APA’s position on the risk of brain damage from ECT.

A. “The importance of the [foregoing autopsied] case lies in that it offers a clear demonstration of the fact that electrical convulsion treatment is followed at times by structural damage of the brain” (Alpers and Hughes, 1942).

B. “This brings us for a moment to a discussion of the brain damage produced by electroshock…. Is a certain amount of brain damage not necessary in this type of treatment? Frontal lobotomy indicates that improvement takes place by a definite damage of certain parts of the brain” (Hoch, 1948). Paul H. Hoch, a Hungarian-born U.S. psychiatrist, had been commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

C. In a report “based on the study of 214 electroshock fatalities reported in the literature and 40 fatalities heretofore unpublished, made available through the kindness of the members of the Eastern Psychiatric Research Association,” David Impastato found that 66 ECT patients had died from “cerebral” causes among the 235 patients for whom the cause of death had been stated (Impastato, 1957). Impastato, a Sicilian-born U.S. psychiatrist, was a leading figure in the early history of ECT in the United States.

D. An extensive American Psychiatric Association membership survey found that 41 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement, “It is likely that ECT produces slight or subtle brain damage”; 26 percent disagreed with the statement (American Psychiatric Association, 1978).

E. “Electroshock ‘works’ by damaging the brain…. [T]he changes one sees when electroshock is administered are completely consistent with any acute brain injury, such as a blow to the head with a hammer” (Coleman, 1978).

F. “The principal complications of EST are death, brain damage, memory impairment, and spontaneous seizures. These complications are similar to those seen after head trauma, with which EST has been compared” (Fink, 1978). Eleven years later, Fink was quoted in a magazine article as saying, “I can’t prove there’s no brain damage [from ECT]. I can’t prove there are no other sentient beings in the universe, either. But scientists have been trying for thirty years to find both, and so far they haven’t come up with a thing” (Rymer, 1989). Max Fink, an Austrian-born U.S. psychiatrist, is the world’s leading proponent of ECT.

G. “After a few sessions of ECT the symptoms are those of moderate cerebral contusion, and further enthusiastic use of ECT may result in the patient functioning at a subhuman level. Electroconvulsive therapy in effect may be defined as a controlled type of brain damage produced by electrical means…. In all cases the ECT “response” is due to the concussion‑type, or more serious, effect of ECT. The patient “forgets” his symptoms because the brain damage destroys memory traces in the brain, and the patient has to pay for this by a reduction in mental capacity of varying degree” (Sament, 1983).

I. “There is an extensive animal research literature confirming brain damage from ECT. The damage is demonstrated in many large animal studies, human autopsy studies, brain wave studies, and an occasional CT scan study. Animal and human autopsy studies show that ECT routinely causes widespread pinpoint hemorrhages and scattered cell death. While the damage can be found throughout the brain, it is often worst in the region beneath the electrodes. Since at least one electrode always lies over the frontal lobe, it is no exaggeration to call ECT an electrical lobotomy” (Breggin, 1998).

3. The most immediate, obvious, and distressing effect of electroshock is amnesia. In her book Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Shock Treatment, electroshock survivor Linda Andre described what that is like: “The memory ‘loss’ that happens with shock treatment is really memory erasure. A period of time is wiped out as if it never happened. Unlike memory loss associated with other conditions, such as Alzheimer’s, which come on gradually and allow patients and families to anticipate and prepare for the loss to some extent, the amnesia associated with… ECT is sudden, violent, and unexpected. Your life is essentially unlived…. You didn’t just lose your suitcase; you can’t say where you got it, what it looks like, what you packed in it, what trips you’ve taken it on. You don’t know that you ever had it” (Andre, 2009).

4. Electroshock’s harmful effects can be long-lasting. Electroshock psychologist Harold A. Sackeim and colleagues concluded their recent study with this statement: “[T]his study provides the first evidence in a large, prospective sample that adverse cognitive effects can persist for an extended period, and that they characterize routine treatment with ECT in community settings” (Sackeim, 2007).

5. Electroshock causes a significant number of deaths. A 1995 report from the Texas Mental Health Department (Smith, 1995) revealed that there were eight deaths among approximately 1,600 patients (1 in 200 cases) who had undergone ECT in Texas over a then recent 15-month period, a rate 50 times higher than the death rate (“about 1 in 10,000 patients”) given in the consent-form sample in the American Psychiatric Association’s Practice of Electroconvulsive Therapy (2001, p. 320). Reports in the professional literature give further evidence that the ECT death rate is much higher than

the rate claimed by ECT proponents (Frank, 2007).

6. There are no scientifically sound studies showing that ECT is an effective method of suicide prevention. The authors of a large study published in the Annals of Clinical Psychiatry (Black, 1989) reported there was no significant difference in the suicide rate for depressed patients treated with ECT, anti-depressants, and neither of these treatments.

7. Unlike its harmful effects, electroshock’s supposedly “therapeutic” effects are brief at best. No study shows that these effects persist for more than at most a few months following the last treatment. One study indicates the relapse rate for ECT patients is up to 50 percent within six months following treatment, “even though antidepressant drugs are continued” (Fink, 1999). Another study of patients diagnosed with “unipolar major depression” concluded “that without active treatment virtually all remitted patients [i.e., patients whose symptoms diminished following ECT] relapse within 6 months of stopping ECT” (Sackeim, 2001). From this, it is clear that an ECT patient with a diagnosis of depression or manic-depression runs the serious risk of becoming a permanent outpatient which usually entails ongoing drug treatment, “maintenance” ECT, and/or occasional inpatient stays.

8. Contrary to claims by ECT defenders, newer technique modifications have made electroshock more harmful than ever. For example, the drugs accompanying ECT to reduce certain risks, including bone fractures, raise seizure threshold so that more electrical current is required to induce the convulsion (Saltzman, 1955): the more current applied, the greater is risk of brain damage and amnesia. Moreover, whereas formerly ECT specialists tried to induce seizures with minimal current, suprathreshold amounts of electricity are commonly administered today in the belief that they are more effective.

9. Not only does the federal government stand by passively as psychiatrists continue to use electroshock, it also actively supports ECT through the licensing and funding of hospitals where the procedure is used, by covering ECT costs in its insurance programs (including Medicare), and by financing ECT research, including some of the most damaging ECT techniques ever devised. One study provides an example of such research. This ECT experiment was conducted at Wake Forest University School of Medicine/North Carolina Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, between 1995 and 1998. It involved the application of electric current at up to 12 times the individual’s convulsive threshold on 36 depressed patients. This reckless disregard for the safety of ECT subjects was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (McCall, 2000).

10. The use of ECT is increasing. More than 100,000 Americans are being electroshocked each year; half are 60 and older, and two-thirds are women. Seventy percent of all ECT is insurance-covered. ECT specialists on average have incomes twice that of other psychiatrists. The cost for inpatient ECT ranges from $50,000 to $75,000 per series (usually 8 to 12 individual sessions). Electroshock is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry.

11. Electroshock is especially dangerous and life-threatening for elderly patients. One Rhode Island study conducted between 1974 and 1983 divided 65 hospitalized depressed patients, 80 years and older, into two groups. Thirty-seven patients in one group were treated with ECT and the 28 in the other group were treated with antidepressant drugs. The death rate after one year for the ECT group was 7.5 times higher than that of the non-ECT group: 10 deaths among the 37 ECT patients (27%) compared with 1 death among the 28 drug-treated patients (3.6%). The authors, 2 psychiatrists, reported that “two patients had only 2 ECTs: one withdrew consent, and the other developed CHF [congestive heart failure] and died before ECT could be continued.” They also reported that there was “lasting recovery” for 22% in the ECT group and 71% in the non-ECT group. The authors attributed the poor outcomes of the ECT patients to “their advanced age and physical illness” (Kroessler and Fogel, 1993). In his extensive study of ECT deaths (referred to in paragraph 2C above), Impastato estimated that the ECT death rate for patients over 60 is one in 200, or 5 times greater than the death rate of 1 in 1,000 for ECT patients of all ages (1957, p. 31).

12. As a destroyer of memories and thoughts, electroshock is a direct, violent assault on these hallmarks of American liberty: freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from assault, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

Tens of thousands of people every year in the United States are deceived or coerced into undergoing electroshock. The FDA should do everything in its power to discourage the use of electroshock by:

keeping ECT’s Class III, high-risk rating;

insisting that electroshock psychiatrists, manufacturers of ECT devices, and executives and administrators in hospitals where ECT is administered, substantiate with scientific proof their claims that the procedure is “safe and effective”; and

calling upon the Congress and the Department of Justice to investigate the fraudulent and coercive use of this cruel and inhuman procedure.

Impastato, D.J. (July 1957). “Prevention of Fatalities in Electroshock Therapy,” Diseases of the Nervous System, p. 31. This 42-page report of 254 deaths is the largest and most detailed study of ECT deaths ever published. It is rarely cited in the writings of ECT proponents.

Like this:

*UPDATE – The word is that there will be no Conference Committee, but each chamber will have to have another up or down vote on the bill after the negotiations are made before it can be sent to the President. I am trying to get confirmation and will update again later.

I have been meaning to blog on this since it happened, but between being out of town over New Year’s and not having time to read a hundred bazillion page health care bill to find all the objectionable parts, looks like the Postpartum drug advocates beat me to it. As I have posted before, the bill is filled with much more mental health garbage than just The MOTHERS Act, but since Harry Reid introduced a brand new substitute bill right before Christmas and had it voted on in a matter of days, I didn’t want to post about anything that wasn’t totally verified. (Not that I believe everything that’s written on a PSI related website.) The Health Care bill has a number of highly contentious issues on which the House and Senate versions differ, so it would ordinarily need to pass through the Conference Committee in order to be sent to the President. (More on that later, but word is that there will be no Conference Committee but rather just some negotiations between key players in the House and Senate.) Now, I don’t think they are lying when they say that The MOTHERS Act passed via the Health Care Bill… but that won’t stop Susan Stone from making a ridiculous and untrue statement about something…

Susan Stone, past President of “Postpartum Support International,” has claimed in her blog on the passage of Harry Reid’s Christmas Eve Substitute Health Care Bill that Melanie Stokes died as a result of “untreated postpartum illness.”

Melanie, a beautiful, intelligent mother of a young child with every reason to live, leapt to her death as a result of untreated postpartum illness.

[emphasis mine]

Susan may not be good at retelling Melanie’s story accurately, although she is good at rewriting history.

Melanie’s was hospitalized three times in seven weeks. She was given four combinations of anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety, and anti-depressant medications. She also underwent electroconvulsive therapy. Her family rallied around her with all their strength, but in the end, Melanie jumped to her death from the twelfth floor of a Chicago hotel.

We have Stone and her buddies to thank for tireless advocacy of pharma-friendly legislation which would risk the lives of many vulnerable women in need and their unborn and newborn babies.

If you are interested in reading the bill’s specific language, you can go to this link and click on “Full Text of Bill as Passed”. The language referencing The MOTHERS Act initiatives can be found on pages 595-604, section 2952 “Support Education and Research for Postpartum Depression.”

Also from her website:

Also, the Mikulski Amendment, which includes SCREENING for postpartum depression also passed in another part of the healthcare reform bill. It was actually the FIRST Amendment included in healthcare reform. Finally, women and mothers are being heard.

This about sums up the passage of The MOTHERS Act via the Health Care Bill: this bill NEVER could have passed on its own thanks to the massive opposition against it, but it takes a Christmas Eve vote on a giant Health Care Bill which nobody has read (well at least until “Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 2:45 PM”) in order to get it through.

So much for Democracy.

The truth about psychiatric drugs & electroshock is summed up in these videos.

“I oppose the FDA’s proposed reclassification of the ECT device to
Class II. The FDA should investigate the ECT device for safety and
effectiveness. The FDA should call for Pre-Market Approval
Applications for the device.”